Photo: Patrick McMullan
Here’s a nice little end-of-day story. So last week, Babble, the hipster parenting site owned by Nerve.com founder and baby daddy Rufus Griscom, started up an online community called Babble Playground. On it, hipster parents can meet to discuss which Belle and Sebastian songs their kids like best and the pros and cons of soy-milk brands among each other, so as not to bore the living crap out of their friends. Nice, right? Not so fast, Papi! Turns out there already is a hipster parenting community called Playground on which soy milk and indie recording artists are discussed, although it’s a little rougher around the edges. This Playground part of the site Offsprung.com, run by noted Alternadad Neal Pollack. And Pollack was not happy about Mr. Fancy Griscom setting up a competing Playground with fancy new equipment.
So naturally he blogged about his outrage, and the posters on his Playground were outraged too. And so a few of them decided to go over to Babble’s Playground and start talking trash.
Now, this made Rufus Griscom unhappy. But he was not going to show it! Griscom has been a privileged person his entire life, after all, and he knows that when poor kids are mean to you, it is just because they are jealous. So he put on a friendly tone and wrote Pollack a little letter. “We had no idea that you had social networking functionality on your site,” he wrote smoothly. “I haven’t been there in some time.” He went on to say he would be removing the thread. Not because it threatened him in any way, but, you know, for Pollack’s own good.
“We are going to take the thread down because it’s inaccurate and kinda tacky, I think, to have your site promoted this way, whether or not this is coming from your people,” he said.
Thanks, bro! Naturally, Pollack was grateful that Griscom was looking out for him, and for the etiquette lesson. “I wish them luck in their sterile loft community and hope that no more ‘kinda tacky&sdquo; people darken their doorstep,” he wrote in his rundown of events.
